The Magical Negro Reveals His Secret

• The Magical Negro Reveals His Secret
• Price: $10.00
• Gabriel Green
• Chapbook - Poetry
• ISBN 978-1-949540-11-6
• 2019 Winter Tide Pool Selection

2019 Winter Soup Bowl Selection

The Magical Negro Reveals His Secret is, among other things, a quest for home and belonging. In this collection of poems, Gabriel Green haphazardly juggles the deeply rooted attachments and interests that, altogether, constitute an identity, while also struggling to discern what things are worth holding onto. Seldom caught without an opinion, Green uses wit, humor and deep introspection to question everything from politics, to music, Black culture and more.

A LOOK INSIDE

In Response to the Intellectual’s Groundbreaking Thesis that Race is a Social Construct

And of course
I am aware of the biblical advice
not to build one’s house
upon sand.
I imagine that sand had a past somewhere
way back when
it was more than the butt end
of a parable.
But what, I ask you,
is sand except the remains
of rocks rubbing each other
the wrong way?
…

HYPE

The town, and with it the boy, begins in “after”, but it doesn’t stay there and maybe that’s the secret. In this chapbook, Gabriel Green promises to reveal The Magical Negro’s Secret and in so doing constructs an entire Black life. These poems are not devoid of violence, loss, hunger; they are full and immediately recognizable. Still, Green writes “My name is become”, and so he does just that. These are poems that find the humor in the search, teeming with scenes and references to a full and undeniable life. As the author himself says, “I suppose forever is kinda funny also”; and in Green’s more than capable hands, it is. I hope these poems breathe forever; because that was Green’s secret all along, breath, as simple and miraculous as that.
–Julian Randall, author of Refuse, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Cover art Nervous Galaxy by Nate Lewis